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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Toon Update: 4/16/09

Well Udluar was released and there was much rejoicing, that is until people tried to enter Ulduar and play the game. All around this has to be one of them most frustrating patching cycles I've ever had.

First, I tried to down load the patch. Apparently my background downloader only got about 10% of it so I had to wait. I decided to let it run while I did some other stuff. When I came back about 30 minutes later I was up to 14%. That was when I realized I was in trouble.

I let it tick for a little while longer but it was clear that this wasn't going to improve, so I tried to down load the patch from a mirror site. That actually went pretty well. I got it all down relatively quickly, but then I had the problem of not knowing what to do with it. Since there seemed to be no instructions on how to load a patch not downloaded using the Blizzard downloader it took me another 30 minutes to get the patch to load because WoW still wanted to download the patch from Blizzard.

When I got it all loaded, I logged it and found massive amounts of errors from my addons. I tried to update my addons from Curse and WoWinterface and found that both sites were FUBAR. At this point I'm thankful that we don't raid on Tuesdays, because it is clear that this Tuesday would have been a waste. The good news is that I was able to get Graylo set up for the most part.I purchased the dual spec and ended up going with Feral Tank as my off spec. I also tried out the new fishing and liked it. Fishing still isn't something I would do for fun, but it is a lot easier now to level. Also, several members of my guild were able to get in and do some 10man stuff in Ulduar. I don't think they made a lot of progress but they both got the first boss down, and got some work on Razorscale.

Wednesday was the big day that we would begin our assault on 25man Ulduar. I was able to get all of my addons updated before hand things seemed to be going well. When the raid was formed I went and explored a little bit and pulled aggro and died taking several of my guildies with me. I'm an idiot.

It was decided that we would skip the easy mode of Flame Leviathan and give it a try with 1 tower up. It was a very sloppy kill but we ended up 2 shotting. I enjoyed the fight but it is clear we need some more practice. I was a passenger in a Demolisher so I had fun shooting the cannon and getting launched through the air.

We then headed to Razorscale and the trouble started. One person logged to check an addon or something. When she tried to log back in she was ported back to her Hearth home and couldn't get back into the instance. Unfortunately we waited around for 2 hours or so for the problem to clear up, but it never did and we didn't get any attempts on Razorscale.

It's frustrating that blizzard seems to have these big server issues every time a content patch is released. I know that this is when content is most popular, and servers are getting hit the hardest. However, its not like this is unexpected. I just expect a little more preparation.

The Alts:I haven't talked about the alts recently but they have been progressing. Grayfel was running Naxx25 almost weekly before the patch. I finally dinged 80 on my priest. I didn't get it done by March 31st as I had hoped but I was only a few days behind. I've even worked on the Mage a little bit and have leveled him from 30 to 35.

The main focus of my non raid time is now clean up. With Graylo I need to work on my Reps and the Heroic Achievements. I want to get to exalted with the 4 Tarbard factions of Northrend. I'm Exalted with one, Revered with two, and honored with the fourth. For the Heroic Achievements I'm about 10 away from the Meta Achievement, the hard part here is finding a group to do them, because some of the ones I need are the hardest ones.

With Grayfel, I was able to get him to Exalted with the Sons of Hodir, which is great but I still have close to 100 quests to do in Icecrown, and I need to grind some rep with him also.Until those things are done I don't want to put to much time into Graypal.

One last thing, I love the new Heirloom items. I picked up the cloth shoulders to help Grayfel and Graypal level, but I picked up the caster staff and trinkets for Grayvik also and they are awesome. Having some really good gear that scales when I level is so helpful. This is a definite win for Blizzard in my opinion.

Hi mate, have you found an update for squeak and awe? do raids without it it's a nightmare, cos I have to focus too much on buffs and cannot see the fight =(.Congrats for the hard mode and have fun in ulduar! ;)

Hey Gray, wondering what your initial impressions of the Moonkin changes are now that you've got to see a bit of Ulduar?

After my second night of raiding with the first 2 bosses down (I'm Australian) I've noticed:-lack of Squawk and Awe!-my single target DPS (at least relative to everyone else) has shot up heaps. I don't know if it's because I could FINALLY get my Idol of the Shooting Star, because of the Nature's Grace change or both. But I never used to get a top 5 finish, but I am consistently now.-Improved Scorch nerf HURTS. I don't know how I'm going to go when I drop my t7.5 4 piece bonus, but I'm already noticing fewer Eclipses.-I'm specced into Gale Winds and I'm topping DPS on AoE. Given that I've used AoE on both Razorscale, Deconstructor and there's likely to be a lot more fights with AoE I'm considering even switching out IS Glyph to get the Starfall glyph.-Nature's Grace almost seems to be permanently up. In the 3 seconds before the debuff fades it's like there's always another crit to proc it. This is even after the Imp Scorch nerf... Starfall helps heaps here, too.

Anyway... odd that you were having trouble with curse - do you use the curse updater or do it manually? Curse updater seemed to work relatively well for me. Also for future patches, try to hop on and update your addons a few times before bed - I've noticed a lot of addon authors update their addons before a major patch with what worked on the PTR the night before the patch, which often helps alleviate issues come patch day.

Luckily enough on my end, I only had to shut off skiner and carbonite. :D

Anyway, grats on the flame kill! I think we did it with 1 tower up, but honestly at that point I was just having so much fun shooting at crap that I lost count. Hah!

Anyway, hope you guys continue to do well, and look forward to more! :D

Squawk and Awe has been updated. I haven't been able to test it yet, but most of the issues seemed to center around the FF bar. AS Tim said you can probably get around the issue by disabling the FF bar if you still have problems.

I didn't have any problems with SAA last night, but I only use SAA for the Eclipse bar. I use Timerbuttons for the DoT Timer.

@Shem

Unfortunately I didn't get any good DPS opportunites. We only attempted FL because the servers crashed after we killed him. Hopefully I will get to play with the changes on a couple of bosses tonight.

@Daez

I download the addons manually. I think my issues with Curse and WoWinterface were purely traffic issues. So many people hitting the server has to be hell on them.

Yeha... not. I had to reset my wireless... again and i cant log on in Dal or SW dont you just love patches. you would think that they have done extencive testing and made sure that the new patch can handle the highest of volumes but it seems lacking once again... Looking foward to many many rolling restarts YAY!

Gargen of Vek'nilash = failp.s. I am not having fun yet oh and all my add ons failed

Oh, ur Squawk post made me miss this entry :) I'm leveling a moonkin atm (reason I got stuck on your blog) and I'm using the heirloom shoulders + casting staff and I must say they are imba. 10% more exp from quests and kills are just lovely alone. I mean 70 - 80 is like 70 - 79 and that saves a lot of time. And not to forget the staff that at level 70 gives ~220 spellpower is a huge booster. :) Thanks for some great blogging!

Unfortunately, I don't think it is possible to look up the IP addresses of commentors using Blogger. (Yet another reason why I should switch to a self hosted Wordpress blog.) I tried to find a pageview long using Google Analytics and compare that to the time of the comment, but google analytics doesn't seem to keep that.